The Silent Sea

Usually the sea below my house is audible in my garden. It can be relatively gentle lapping or the thunder of heavy waves in a swell or driven by gale force winds.

On other, rare, occasions the sea feels as though there is a steely, unreal quietness in it. It's a rare occurrence and the results are shown in the pictures below:

When I see the sea like that I am always reminded of a paining by Finnish artist Akseli Gallen-Kallela that I saw and liked in the National Gallery in London. It is called Lake Keitele: A Vision of Finland. 

What I do not know is what phenomenon or combination of circumstances causes it. 

A Christmas Catch-up

The shortest day and longest night have come and gone. We can now look forward to more light in the evenings and less getting out of bed when it's still pitch black. We are in the third day of meteorological Winter. It will be the 20 March before Spring is upon us. And yet there is something rather magical about one's increasingly positive outlook on life once the days start getting longer. I appreciate that many of you may not be living in a place where the hours of daylight at this time of year are little more than 6 but, for those of us who are, believe me every extra minute added to daylight counts.

Of course, if you are in the Southern Hemisphere your Spring is over officially and you are entering summer. It's at moments like this that I get very homesick for my New Zealand life. Of course I accept that it's over and I can't realistically travel there again but it is still emotionally very hard at times.  With Covid rampant in so much of the world I wouldn't be travelling anyway. 

In many ways this is all eclipsed by the Covid restrictions but, at the moment, we in the Scottish Outer Islands are, I think, less restricted than anywhere else in the UK and Northern Ireland. That will change on Boxing Day when we will have more restrictions because of the new variant. However our cafes and shops can still open. 

This year I made a Christmas card to send to all my friends and family. In 1969/70 there was a national exhibition at Liverpool's Walker Art Gallery of paintings by amateur painters. I liked one enough to buy it. It's a winter scene and I recently thought that I would use it for my Christmas card. It takes a bit of doing but can you see what the fox is looking at? I think it was that tiny spark of humour which so endeared me to the artist.

Wishing you a 

Happy Christmas.

I hope that the New Year brings 

you good health, contentment,

 and a happy heart.

Graham

A Face

Rachel recently re-posted some art from the Odessa Museum of Modern Art in the Ukraine. One of the works was this portrait:

On several occasions I have posted this picture by David Gauld which hangs in the Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery in Glasgow.

My comment on Rachel's blog was to the effect that I could stand in front of it for a long time. There is so much in those eyes staring at nothing and that expression - such loneliness they seem to have gone beyond pain. It occurred to me that there is a great similarity in the expression in the two painting yet I've never felt pain in Gauld's portrait before. Now I'm not so sure.

Art? Really?

Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan’s work, Comedian, a piece of fruit duct-taped to a wall, has been snapped up at Art Basel in Miami for $120,000. One in a series of three, a second version of the piece has also been sold for a similar price.

Am I the only one who remains unconvinced?

Home Again (Again)

I arrived home late on Sunday evening after a good journey up the road and a remarkably calm ferry crossing given the huge storm on Saturday. 

Sailing out of Ullapool and down Loch Broom to The Minch

It had been a Good Week. The scans were clear and I'm continuing on the drugs trial. I've spent a couple of days getting back into my daily 'routine' (a silly term because I have few actual routines). I'm up at crack of dawn in the morning to take Gaz to the airport and his return to Italy.

Settling back in wasn't helped by the fact that the internet had, once again, disappeared in my absence. This time it was because the box on the telegraph pole had been destroyed in Saturday's storm. I was reinstated yesterday.

An Engineer up a telegraph pole. He's spent a lot of time mending my phoneline one way and another

My last day in Glasgow included a visit to one of my favourite (and much blogged about) places: Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery. A visit is never complete without seeing the Glasgow Boys exhibition.

Old Willie - The Village Worthy -  Sir James Guthrie 1886

The Last of the Clan -  Thomas Faed 1865

A Highland Funeral  Sir James Guthrie 1882 
The cottage in the picture still stands but is in a derelict state.
It can be found alongside the Black Water river just up the lane from The Byre Inn public house in the village of Brig O'Turk,
As can be seen women did not generally attend funerals at that time

Seven Dwarfs

I expect that almost all my readers will know that the Seven Dwarfs in the Disney version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs were named Happy, Doc, Grumpy, Sleepy, Bashful, Sneezy, and Dopey. 

However in 1916, Snow White was produced for the first time in film by Paramount Pictures, adapted from the 1912 Broadway version. This was during the silent film era and at this time the  Seven Dwarfs were named for the first time Blick, Flick, Glick, Snick, Plick, Whick and Quee.

Tolkein also was very keen on dwarfs and it was he who coined the plural of dwarf as Dwarves.  We know the names of the lines of Dwarves of the 7 founded, these are: Longbeards, Broadbeams, Firebeards, Ironfists, Stiffbeards, Blacklocks and Stonefoots. However we only know the name of the father of the first line (Longbeards) which was Durin. 

All that was simply to introduce you to a composite of seven of the pictures I took of Joshua. Adrian, that wizard of photo manipulation, produced the following:

Art v Reality?

When my visitors mentioned in the last post were here I, of course, took lots of photos. I have only used a few but it was quite interesting to see several which formed part of a long sequence of Joshua running along a ridge above me at Garry Sands. Straight out of the camera they looked like the first two with dark foregrounds and were, I though, quite 'arty' and I liked them. However with a little tweak, they became visual records of a moment in time and little more.

What thinkest thou?

 

Glasgow's Wall Art

Glasgow has a lot of wonderful wall art. This is the wall of my favourite concert venue: the City Halls. It is one of several a wonderful concert venues in Glasgow and Glasgow's oldest purpose built performance space which has been entertaining visitors since 1841. The traditional shoebox style auditorium is renowned throughout the world for having some of the finest acoustics and the elegant and spectacular Hall is also home to the Scottish Music Centre. This exciting music complex houses top class rehearsal, recording, broadcasting and webcasting facilities.

A Sunday Smile

Well, actually, I suppose it's a smile for any day that you happen to read this. Well I hope they make you smile. They certainly happified me. 'They' being these envelopes (and their contents) from my brother, CJ. I would love to have had some of his artistic talent.

Speed

Heron of A Heron's View posted recently on the problems of commenting on Blogger recently. From the comments he is obviously not alone. As it happens I had already started to draft one on the inordinate time it takes for comments to publish I recently timed some comments that I made and the fastest to appear after I'd clicked 'publish' was 17 seconds. That's not a lot if you are waiting for a bus (whatever a bus is) but it is if you are commenting on blogs and responding to comments on your own. Just for the record I have super-fast broadband

On the other hand if you want real slowness hard to bear the Royal Mail with this one. I received on the 7th January a Christmas card which had been posted on the 2nd December (sic) so had taken over 5 weeks to travel from Sheffield. It was designed (possibly not intending it to be a Christmas card!) by my great nephew Toby (aged 1) which I thought showed a remarkable talent for colour and composition. 

An Envelope

I sometimes receive unusual mail. No one, though, can surely ever have received a letter in an envelope like tihs work of art which I received from my brother a little while ago:

Emotionally Drained

Apart from my times in New Zealand when I posted on my other blog this is, I'm pretty sure, the longest period between posts since i started this blog in 2007. 

I've been very busy helping my son get his house finished. It's nearly there. I've also been working on my own house in my 'spare' time.

Yesterday was the turning point.

I'm in Glasgow for a few days and yesterday was one of the most emotionally charged days I can recall for a long time.

The first thing I did was take my beloved Nighthawk to be sold. As she sat there all valeted and gleaming at the Car Auction I steeled myself to walk away. Writing this (after the rest of the day) I want to go back and bid for her, ask for her forgiveness, and take her back to Lewis for a long and happy retirement. As it is I can only hope that her new owner gets as much enjoyment and is as happy with her and as good to her as I have been.

In the afternoon a couple of friends and I travelled over by train to Edinburgh (an impossible place in which to park a car) to see an exhibition of Joan Eardley's paintings at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern Two). 

Then we went to the Edinburgh Festival Theatre to see Matthew Bourne's ballet company perform his production of The Red Shoes. I love ballet and have done ever since I saw a production of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake at the Royal Court in Liverpool as part of the Commonwealth Arts Festival in 1965. In New Zealand we used to go to (and I have blogged about) several productions each season at the Napier or Hastings theatres. I've been to far too few productions in the UK. 

Even if one does not like ballet I challenge anyone to go and see yesterday's production and not be moved. For me it was one of the most magnificent, dramatic and emotionally challenging ballet production I have ever seen. The standing ovation was well deserved.

We all arrived back at Anna's in the hour before midnight. Cheese and wine appeared as if by magic and disappeared down grateful throats as we reminisced on a wonderful afternoon and evening.  We eventually made way to our beds and slept....and slept.

Whistler

This week we visited the Huntarian Art Gallery. I enjoy going back every so often to see the Whistler collection and a few other special pieces. Often there is a special exhibition and I never cease to be amazed when I find something new to see in a work I've seen a dozen time before.

Anyone who knows the work of the American artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834 to 1903) will have their favourites (assuming they like his work). His most iconic works (I think) are his life-size portraits which started with The Symphony in White No 1. The Hunterian has a significant number of these portraits. However whilst they are wonderful works (they have a vaguely Pre-Raphaelite feel about them which attracts me) far and away my favourite work is a small portrait apparently unusually done in one sitting entitled Dorothy Seaton, A Daughter of Eve (1903).

There are a great many versions of this image on the internet including an enlargable one on the Hunterian website at the last link I have given .

This is how I see it:

Another Place

In September Yorkshire Pudding ventured into the alien territory of the Red Rose and one of the results was a rather moving poem  about the Antony Gormley figures at Crosby beach. 

I spent a lot of my youthly social life in Crosby. Amongst other friends was a friend with whom I had a particular affinity who lived with his parents in one of the splendid villas which now look out over the Gormley sculptures:

It was some years since I had been there but my brother and sister-in-law were keen to go earlier in the week. It was a spur of the moment decision when we were in Birkenhead near the Mersey Tunnel and we didn't think to check on the state of the tide.

The sculpture entitled 'Another Place' consists of 100 cast-iron, life-size figures spread out along three kilometres of the foreshore, stretching almost one kilometre out to sea. I saw it when the tide was out and it was amazing although I don't think all the original figures were visible even then and they certainly weren't this visit. Having said that there are more in the photo below than one can see at first glance although I had the advantage of the original photo and a digital loupe.

What saddened me though was the huge amount of detritus lining the water mark:

And Now For Something Completely Different

Over the years I have collected the occasional piece of pottery that interested me. Here are a few of those that remain in my collection.

Pot, 17cm, by Vee Harper, Guildfod Village Potters, Perth, Western Australia.

Possibly my favourite piece for a number of reasons:

It is beautifully simple in form and yet the outcome is wonderfully complex in colour and texture

and, for me, it represents so much of 'the colour of Australia'.

Handmade stoneware figure, 19cm, by Natàlia Ferré, Forès, Spain

Handmade stoneware teapot, 30cm, of Margaret Thatcher as Britannia in the style of Gerald Scarfe by Sue Blair of Borve Pottery on the Isle of Lewis

One of my most valued (and probably valuable) pieces which I fell in love with the second I saw it in an exhibition back in the day and had to have despite, at the time, being unable to afford it.

Made by a member of the Napier Pottery Club, 16 cm, and bought in a shop in Napier, New Zealand.

It is probably the least expensive piece I've ever bought (a perfect example of someone undervaluing their worth) and yet one of the most expressive of pieces.

Golden Eagle, 21cm, modelled by Tom Mackie of Aviemore and produced by Scotia Ceramics at Coll Pottery on the Isle of Lewis

Art - Another Four

One of the most difficult of my pictures to photograph (apart from the problems of photographing pictures behind glass) is this one by Peter Luti: one of his relatively few 'black phase' paintings. It was a present for my 60yh birhday and is one of the most treasured of my pictures.

These two original batiques were favourites of our late son Andrew and hung in his flat. They are so beautifully vibrant and positive that they really lift the room they are in.

I was having a coffee in a coffee bar/gallery in Napier some years ago when I saw this painting which was very representative of both the Art Deco heritage of Napier and the New Zealand Flax which is endemic in the country and also the wind which so often blew and made the heat so pleasant. It now graces my living room.

I was introduced to the art of  Wes Martin by Kate a couple of years ago and when I went to his site this canvas entitled Autumn Winds and Winter Ghosts was on his easel. I fell for it instantly and it now sits next to the door netween my living room and the hall so I can see it and be happy every time I walk through the door. The frame was my choice.

Art

Cro has posted a few references to art recently that have made me think (quite an achievement at the best of times).  One related to Joyce Pensato and Rose Wylie: two artists of whom I had never heard. During the comments (Cro's posts usually provoke good discussions) Cro said "I think we 'trained' painters see things quite differently to others. We spend so much time studying composition, colour, positives and negatives, size, shape, form, you name it we studied it. Looking at paintings then becomes a whole new world where the final thing we usually notice is the subject matter. Of the 2 above I much prefer Rose Wylie's work; it takes me away on crazy journeys."

Now to be honest whilst I would stand and contemplate their work in a gallery their art is not something for my walls.  That made me recall that on several occasions over the years I have said, in answer to comments on my blogs, that I would post some pictures of the art I do have. On the whole it's reasonably conventional. I thought I would start with a few paintings (some of my art is pottery).

The first is entitled "An Unmade Bed' and is by David Woodford. There is a story behind it.

About 10 years ago I was being shown round an acquaintance's house in New Zealand. In the master bedroom was a painting. As I was standing in front of it tears came to my eyes and I just stood there weeping. I have no idea why. I cannot ever recall a painting having such a deep effect on me before or since. I have problems keeping images in my head but the subject of that picture remained with me. The acquaintances became friends. The subject of the painting was never mentioned again. A few years ago in New Zealand I was at a family occasion and so were they. Completely out of the blue I was handed the painting with the words. "This painting was obviously meant to be with you. It is yours now." 

I have never really felt that I actually own any work of art. They will outlast me. I am only a custodian but, in this case, a custodian of an object with great emotional meaning.

The second is a relatively recent acquisition and is by Philip Raskin from a friend's gallery

This water-colour was bought in Tuscany one summer in the '90s when there was some flooding in the valley where we bought this which was really quite strange given the fabulous weather we'd had.

This "The Leaving of Lewis" is by Deborah Cameron and is one of the most atmospheric of works.

Bentley at Le Mans

A few months ago when I was in New Zealand the subject came up somewhere in Blogland of pictures which we had in our houses.  I have brought some of my pictures back from New Zealand this time and the question has arisen as to where they will be shown.  I have many more pictures than I have space to show them so I swap some pictures around.  This has the advantage that I become more aware of the pictures and I actually get to see more than I would see if they were always static.  Of course some pictures just live in 'their' place and never move.  This is happening to more pictures as time and the collection progresses.

Anyway I thought I would accede to the request and show you some of my pictures over the next few months.

The first one (for no particular reason) is one which John and Sue bought me for my 60th Birthday.  The story is that John and Sue and I had been having lunch in Angoulême when I was staying with them in France and we went to a gallery and I happened to see this picture and remarked that I liked it because it portrayed the Le Mans race of 1929 and a Bentley 4½ litre 'Big Six' similar to the one which my Uncle Eric had possessed.  No 10 shown in the picture won the 1929 race.

The picture is now in my living room over the roll top desk which was also Uncle Eric's and which was and is one of the few 'things' I possess which is of exceptional importance to me.  It lived inside the front door of the cottage in Clophill in Bedfordshire that my Uncle lived in when I was knee high to a grasshopper.  I always wanted to roll my marbles along the roll-top but Mum forbid me to do so.